Keeping up with Game of Thrones’ The Mountain For 24 Hours Will Exhaust You

The unbearable lightness of being The Mountain: Eat, train, ice tub, repeat. Twenty-four hours with one of the world’s strongest men.

By Josh Dean | Photographs by Peter Yang

Twenty-Four Hours With The Mountain

We trekked to Iceland to eat, lift, and chill with Hafþór Björnsson for a day

By Josh Dean | Photographs by Peter Yang

The hardest thing about trying to become the world’s strongest man is definitely the eating. Sure, picking up and carrying two refrigerators weighing over 900 pounds is difficult, as is chucking a 50-pound keg over a wall, pulling a fire truck or jumbo jet attached to a harness, and of course pressing a 220-pound dumbbell overhead with one hand. But what really pushes Hafþór "Thor" Björnsson to his human performance limits is the sixth large meal of the day. The two-time World’s Strongest Man runner-up, stares at the bowl of rib eyes and rice cradled in his enormous hands like a child with a pile of spinach standing in the way of dessert, sighs, and swallows a forkful. “I need to force feed myself,” he says. “I’m constantly fighting to stay the weight I am.”

Björnsson is one of the largest physical specimens you could possible encounter on the planet Earth. In describing his extreme physiology, metaphors basically fail. You could say his arms are like tree limbs, but that would be unfair to his arms. His biceps are 17 inches. His waist 45 inches. His chest 63 inches. Even his fingers look like they’re jacked.

The 29-year-old Icelander is most famous for playing Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane on the series HBO Game of Thrones and that nickname could not be more apt. He stands six-foot-nine and typically weighs 409 extremely proportional pounds, but he’s in the process of trying to add power, in an attempt to win the two major titles that have eluded him – the Arnold Strongman Classic, and the World’s Strongest Man. So, he has bulked himself up to 431 pounds, mostly by shoveling 10,000 calories of steak and rice into the hole in the middle of his red Viking beard every day.

This morning, like all mornings, began with six eggs, bacon, and oatmeal, followed two hours later by some sliced steak and rice. Four more times, basically every two hours, he ate more steak and rice, a few times with some vegetables on the side. Some days, he’ll mix in chicken, but never fish, because fish is too lean, and Thor is trying so hard to stay big. He knows that the best meal for gaining and maintaining weight is steak and rice – and only white rice, because his body digests it more quickly than brown rice or pasta, which means he can start eating again sooner. “You learn these things,” he says.

Björnsson is sitting at a long dining table in the sleek, modern two-bedroom house just outside Reykjavik that he shares with his normal-sized girlfriend, Andrea, a student in mechanical engineering, and their tiny, vivacious Pomerian, Asterix, who has an affinity for chewing pant legs. “He is a champion like his Daddy,” Björnsson notes, proudly. He met Andrea at his old gym, Jakabol, which translates to “nest of giants” and has a sign on the wall that says “no pussies” in Icelandic. It was founded by Björnsson’s mentor, the Icelandic strongman Magnus ver Magnusson, and is the place where Jon Pall Sigmarsson, the first-ever four-time World’s Strongest Man winner, died while working out. Björnsson points to a Sigmarsson quote tattooed in Icelandic on his right shin. “It says, ‘There is no reason to be alive if you can’t do deadlift,’” Björnsson explains. “He said that while he was deadlifting, setting a record. Then he died at a very young age.” While deadlifting.

Björnsson got his first tattoo at 16, against his father’s wishes, and has been slowly covering himself in ink ever since. His right arm is now a mural of colorful Viking imagery, from shoulder to wrist – Thor, Odin, Valhalla, a warrior on a horse. There is a woman’s face, too. “That is my girlfriend,” he says, and chuckles, making it clear that this is not his girlfriend. “When you get the first tattoo, you think a lot about it,” he says. “Then you have 20 and you don’t fucking care. Just put a tattoo on me!”

It is February, when the Icelandic sun doesn’t rise until 9am, and the weather is best described as the worst day of the year in Seattle, every day: some combination of stiff wind, thick gray clouds, and freezing drizzle. But weather has no effect on Thor. He is always hot. “I don’t feel very well at this weight,” he says. “I feel tired, because I have to move more weight.” He also has trouble breathing and, according to Andrea, snores more often, and louder. It even affects his sleep. At a more typical weight – say, 400 pounds – Björnsson sleeps 8 hours a night. “But when I’m heavy like this I get 6 hours,” he says. “It’s harder to sleep.” He takes a deep, labored breath. “My body doesn’t want to be here. A little lighter is more comfortable.”

And then Björnsson wearily raises his fork, again. “It’s a full-time job to be this size,” he says, as Andrea reaches over and plucks a few stray grains of rice from his beard.

Hafþór Björnsson’s life changed in 2014 with a phone call. Someone in the casting department on Game of Thrones, which was then filming in Iceland, rang to ask if he wanted to audition for the part of the Mountain, a role that had been played by two different men over the show’s first three seasons. “I thought it was some kind of joke. I had no acting experience,” he says. “I was just a big dude competing in Strongman.”

Björnsson was tall before he was thick, and as a kid he played basketball – well enough to make Iceland’s junior national team. Injuries plagued him, however, and he quit the game at 20. He was working out at Jakopol when Magnusson spotted this unfamiliar 230-pound Viking and asked him if he’d ever considered training for strongman competitions. A year later, he was Iceland’s Strongest Man. He earned his first wildcard into the World’s Strongest Man in 2011, and finished sixth. The next two years, he was third. And that’s where he was – a young and promising strongman who worked days as a bank security guard – when he heard from Game of Thrones.

The audition called for a few lines but mostly what the producers wanted to see was athleticism. They needed a man who was huge, sure, but more important was the way he moved and handled a sword. “A lot of big guys can’t bend down, have knee pain, are slow,” Björnsson says. “I’m fast. I’m flexible, especially for my size.” CC Smiff, the show’s sword fighting specialist, was impressed; he offered Björnsson the job a few days later.

“I knew it was a huge thing for me, but I didn’t know how huge,” Björnsson says. Within a year, he had quit his security job to be a full-time strongman with a sideline as an actor. His fame from the show fueled his popularity in strongman contests. Commercials followed. He bought a Range Rover and a house. He is now the part owner and spokesperson for Icelandic Mountain Vodka. “It was a fucking huge U-turn,” he says.

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Last year, Björnsson left the Nest of Giants and opened Thor’s Power Gym. It’s in an old garage next to an auto body shop just above a busy road outside of the center of Reykjavik. There are two empty kegs outside the sliding door, but not because anyone at the gym has been drinking from them. These kegs are for tossing – keg tossing being one of the many peculiar events that strongmen compete in, along with airline pulling and boulder lifting.

Björnsson is the unchallenged world champion of throwing things, holding the record for both weight over bar (100 pounds over a bar 20 feet) and keg toss (33 pounds over a bar 23.5-feet) and the parking lot is where he and his friends practice. They throw kegs across the gravel lot, heeding only one house rule. “You must make sure you don’t hit any cars,” Thor says.

He also excels at the more athletic events, which require both strength and agility. “I’m fast for my size,” he says. “I’m very good at moving events – throwing, pulling trucks, Atlas stones. I win them all.”

Björnsson has won Iceland’s Strongest Man six years in a row, and Europe’s Strongest Man twice, in 2014 and 2015.

His weakness, as much as he has one, is in static lifting, which probably has more to do with his extreme height than any lack of power. Björnsson towers over most of his competitors and so has to lift the same weight a larger distance. It’s simple physics. Lord knows, he’s as strong as anyone on the planet. Back in 2015, at the World’s Strongest Viking competition in Norway. Björnsson broke a record that had stood for more than 1,000 years when he stepped under and lifted a 32-foot, 1433-pound log. According to legend, the famed Icelander Orm Storulfsson once carried a log that size – a ship’s mast, actually – a total of three steps. Depending on the version of the story you hear, it took between 8 and 50 men to lift the log onto his shoulders and after those three steps his back broke. “He was never the same after,” Björnsson says. “I think he died soon.” Björnsson was the only contestant to attempt the log and he carried it five steps, which counts for shattering the record. Every step, he recalls, he could feel his spine compressing under the crushing weight. “Pain everywhere,” he says.

Pain is just part of the job when your job is picking up boulders and pulling cars – as much a part of the job as the relentless onslaught of steak and rice bowls, and the steady drip of smoothies filled with whey protein, BCAAs, fish oil, calcium, and an alphabet soup of supplements, dispensed by the scoopful from jugs that fill an entire cabinet in his kitchen.

Björnsson has won Iceland’s Strongest Man six years in a row, and Europe’s Strongest Man twice, in 2014 and 2015 (he finished second last year, in 2016), but he has yet to capture the Arnold and World’s Strongest Man titles, and that bothers him. His best finish at the former is second, just this year, and he’s nearly won the latter twice – including a half-point loss to American Brian Shaw in 2014 that came down to the final event. In 2017, Björnsson says, he’s more focused and prepared than ever. He’s not traveling, and is turning down most acting opportunities that aren’t Game of Thrones, with only a few exceptions – such as a music video for an Icelandic pop star that he was scheduled to tape in a few days’ time. At his gym.

“I’m being selfish,” Thor says. “I’m thinking of myself. I want to focus on training, eating, and sleeping. I can do commercials later.”

Thor lifts four days a week, typically with the second and third strongest men in Iceland as partners and spotters. Some mornings, they lift the super yoke; other days, they chuck kegs out in the parking lot. Occasionally, someone will attempt to press the matte copper 129-kilogram Cyr dumbbell. So far, only Thor has ever actually pressed it and he likes to trick visitors into attempting to pick it up by lying about the weight. “It’s 64 kilograms,” he said to a recent guest, and when he strained and groaned and barely raised the weight an inch over the floor, Björnsson guffawed. “You can name your hernia Thor.”

It’s late morning on a Monday and he’s already eaten two large meals. Despite being agile, he has an odd gait, as if he’s straddling a pony. He ambles into the gym wearing blank pants, black sneakers, and a black tank top with Thor’s Power Gym on the front. On the back is a checklist in white. It reads: “To do list: train, eat, rest, GAIN.”

“Simple,” he says, and smiles.

In the back corner, a poster of Björnsson spattered in blood from his most iconic Game of Thrones scene – when the Mountain popped Prince Oberyn’s head with his bare hands – looks down upon a list ranking the best times on the gym’s lone Concept 2 rowing machine. The leader is, of course, Thor. His time in the 500-meter row, 1:19, is only 9 seconds off the world record, set in 1991. “I don’t train on this,” he says. “It was the third time in my life I ever tried it.” (He also holds the gym record for the 1000, at 3:21.)

On this day he and his two partners are doing relatively light work while Scandinavian death metal thunders over the speakers. There are short bursts of awesome, almost effortless strength, followed by long breaks for texting and jokes; it is the opposite of high-intensity interval training.

They clean and jerk a 172-pound axle bar as if lifting someone’s bag into the overhead compartment then move to the axle bar, custom made for Thor by a local welder. It’s an awkward lift – the bar itself is intentionally thick, and it doesn’t spin in the holder’s grip, making it “10 times harder to clean,” he says. For now, they’re working only on technique, and not power, because axle isn’t an event at the Arnold. He won’t see it until Europe’s Strongest Man, in April. On the log, Thor raises 428 pounds overhead three times (454.3 pounds is his personal record) and then easily presses 407 pounds on the incline bench. Plans to go for a PR in the super-yoke have been pushed back a day. “I’m going to try 710,” he says. “That’s the most I’ve ever lifted.”

Two hours later, Thor plops into a well-worn leather chair in the gym’s office; it barely fits him. He peels the Saran wrap off of a clump of supplement pills and stuffs them into his mouth a few at a time, chasing the pills with a milky white drink and then moving on to a recovery shake the color of Pepto-Bismol. Behind him, a wall is covered in medals from various competitions and from the Guinness Book of World Records.

Competing in strongman is one of the world’s oldest and most niche sports but it’s a hard way to make a living. Most competitions pay a few thousand dollars, Björnsson says, and the vast majority of even top competitors have day jobs. One of his two workout partners is a personal trainer. The other works as a nightclub bouncer. And they’re probably the two strongest Icelanders after him. “Not many strongmen in the world can make a living,” Björnsson says. “Maybe five guys.”

He lifts four days a week but comes to the gym every day, at least to do some light cardio and stretching, and to catch up on autographs.

He lifts four days a week but comes to the gym every day, at least to do some light cardio and stretching, and to catch up on autographs. Fan engagement is now a big part of his business. There’s an entire closet of Thor-branded gear with slogans like “Training to fight the Mountain” and for a price any fan can ask for a shirt to be signed. Thor’s father first put the shirts up for sale online and he still handles that part of the business. In fact, he’s just arrived to take care of the day’s orders.

“Hi, I’m Hafthor’s father,” says a tall man with a gray Fu Manchu mustache, as he removes a leather jack to reveal an airbrush-style t-shirt with a bald eagle soaring over a waterfall. He is normal-sized, thickness-wise, but still strong and athletic seeming. You can see where Thor got his frame.

Thor’s father ducks into a back office to begin fulfilling orders while his son prepares to eat, again – this time from a box of meat and vegetables over rice that he picked up from a fast casual Mexican-style restaurant on the way to the gym. “This is the time when I’m eating but I don’t want to eat,” he says. Marlon Brando looks down upon him from a framed poster that Andrea banished from the house. “She didn’t like it so much,” he says.

A man Thor’s size has many limitations, including clothes, which must be custom-tailored. Usually, he just wears shorts and a tank top because it’s more comfortable, especially now that he’s 430 pounds. Since 2014, he’s flown exclusively business class, which is a necessity more than a luxury, but for a few years before that he traveled the world in coach, always miserable. He’ll never forget one long haul from Malaysia when he was stuck in a middle seat between old ladies. The two were friends, and talked the whole way, but refused his increasingly desperate offers to trade seats. “I asked the one on the end to change because I go the bathroom a lot, but she wouldn’t to it,” he says. “It was the worst flight ever. I felt like I was in old lady jail.”

Björnsson thinks that when it’s all finished, when he’s won the Arnold Strongman and the World’s Strongest Man, perhaps a few times each, as well as 10 consecutive Iceland Strongest Man titles, he’ll cut back on the calories and settle in at a more normal weight. He thinks that’s probably about 375 pounds.

At that point, Björnsson thinks, he might pursue acting full-time. He thinks he might even like to move to America and become the guy who gets cast in action movies that call for agile goliaths.

“I’m unique,” he says, with a smirk. “You cannot go out on the street and find guys my size. If you want a big ass motherfucker with a lot of muscles – and great ass – call me!”

Thor likes to cook. It’s something he and Andrea do together in the small but well-appointed kitchen of their home. There’s a large chef’s stove with a hood that vents through the wall, a nice washtub sink, and an absurdly under-sized refrigerator. This fridge would be small for anyone, but it’s a legitimate nuisance for Björnsson, who quite honestly needs a walk-in. “I go the grocery store every day, or at most every two days,” he says, pulling out several rib eye steaks, a block of butter, and some leafy vegetables.

Nearby, Andrea whips up a sauce of melted Icelandic cheese that will be spooned over the steak and rice, to add even more delicious, fatty calories. When the two first met, less than two years ago, she was competing in fitness modeling competitions – the ones in which women flex on stage in bikinis –and worked out at Jakopol to stay fit. She wasn’t a fan of Game of Thrones and didn’t recognize the pushy giant was who kept asking her out. “She was just thinking, ‘ Who the fuck is this guy?’” Björnsson says, wrapping an arm around her. “She declined my offer of a first date. I didn’t give up.” He tried again, four times, until she finally said yes.

“He kept asking so much,” Andrea recalls. “I thought I might have to give him one chance just so that he’ll stop asking me.”

On the second date, Björnsson cooked. He made one of his favorite calorie-dense strongman meals – chicken breast stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon. “I didn’t know that she didn’t like bacon,” he says. Andrea ate it, because she is polite. “Now when I make it, there’s no bacon.”

Tonight, they will have both potatoes and white rice, as well as salad with almond slivers and sliced strawberries. Thor takes the largest rib eye and eats about a third of Andrea’s steak, too. He washes it all down with goji berry juice.

Björnsson wears a tattoo with the slogan, “There is no reason to be alive if you can’t do deadlift”.

Outside, it is dark and drizzling, again. Any minute now, it will turn over to sleet. Andrea retreats to the bedroom to study as her home begins to fill with enormous Vikings – five Icelandic strongmen who are giant by any measure, except in comparison to their friend Thor, who towers over every one of them.

The chef’s kitchen was a major selling point of the house, but what really sold Björnsson was the fenced backyard – which was unfinished, “just dirt,” he says. He planted some grass, installed an in-ground trampoline for his daughter, and built a large patio focused around two enormous tubs. One is for Iceland’s famous geothermally heated hot water, which comes out of the ground near 100 degrees, and the other is filled with extremely cold water. Björnsson alternates between the two before bed most nights, as part of his recovery, and welcomes his friends from Thor’s Power Gym, who can’t afford their own hot and cold tubs because they aren’t also international TV stars.

By the time Björnsson has grudgingly swallowed the final bite of his sixth and final meal of the day, all five of them are already out in recovery. They rotate clockwise around the hot tub, until one of them reaches the back corner nearest the cold tub, at which point that Viking stands up, steps over the side, and plops into the frigid water, always with the expression of a man who has just been kicked in the testicles.

Björnsson removes his 5XL tank top and sandals and shuffles out the door to take his place.

“Watch out for the flood!” one of the Vikings yells. “Big boy is coming!”

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